Furniture maker James Winby crafting a bureau. Photograph: Sam Frost for the Guardian

James Winby feels particularly satisfied when a drawer fits beautifully. "You get that lovely little puff of air as it just seats home inside the box." But he can become a little too attached to the finished item: "It's always a shame to exchange a piece of furniture for a cheque but, ultimately, that's what I do."

He designs and makes framework (tables and chairs) and casework (drawers, doors and cabinets). Each piece begins with a concept driven by the customer and realised through plans and drawings created by Winby.

Right now he's working on a large, contemporary-looking bureau with numerous storage drawers and two dropdown desks on sliding struts, with buried magnets inside, so that everything holds together with no catches.

It has taken him and his assistant, Jethro, two and a half months so far. When I meet him, he's creating a dovetail joint for one of the drawers in the secretaries (the block of cubby holes and drawers that sit above the desks).

His well-ordered workshop is divided into two large rooms, one containing the electric saws that cut out the basic designs and another which is devoted to fine hand-crafting. He makes all dovetail joints by hand and there are four (one on each corner) on each drawer. The basic principle is a right angle that fits angled, interlocking teeth. The technical terms are pins and tails. The tails are the teeth and the pins are the gaps in between them.

Winby draws the pins and tails on one piece of wood and begins to cut these out using a fine handsaw. Tiny measurements make a huge difference: accuracy is vital. He uses a series of gauges and squares to check the angles of the front and side of the drawer correspond with each other. He always cuts out tails from the drawer sides first. He then secures this panel in a vice and traces the shape on to the adjoining front panel so they will fit together. He scores the lines with a scalpel and goes over them in pencil. Sawing out the middle tail is problematic because an ordinary blade cannot turn corners, so he uses a coping saw to get between the pins and remove waste. "For a dovetail joint to fit really nicely you can't have any scraggly bits of wood left in the corners. It's all got to be very crisp, neat joinery … you mustn't undercut the joint because the strength relies on its mating just so. Alan Peters, who I apprenticed with, used to say you mustn't leave space for the flies in winter."

Winby is intensely focused on the skill of registering the two panels precisely. It's important that they hammer together in one go, without checking then removing them, because each time you do this you damage the wood fibres. Winby hammers the two strips of wood together; they sit perfectly. He brings out his beloved old plane, given to him by his father, and planes and sands the drawer down to a 240 grit before applying a coat of hardwax oil. Drawers like this don't misbehave, he says. They last forever.

As modern homes are invariably centrally heated, the wood must be well dried before it is cut to prevent it warping under dry conditions. Winby sources much of his wood from local felled trees. He has one stacked up outside. Presently he will transfer it to a shed, then indoors to the workshop. Timber takes around two years to dry out.

Piles of laburnum, oak, box, walnut, London plane, cedar and yew lie outside the workshop. He looks at them lovingly: "Like a lot of woodworkers you get rather fanatical about your timber and, sometimes, you don't really want to use it because it will be gone."